PRAGUE 1968

Thursday 21st August 2025 was the 57th  anniversary of the Soviet led invasion of Czechoslovakia, it’s an anniversary that increasingly passed unnoticed,  save perhaps by some people in Prague, although the spectre of Russian intervention inn Eastern Europe, remerged following Russias attack on the Ukraine. 

A Prague street scene in 1968

While the Soviet Union is history, although Russia on the rise in the east, people have lots of other things to be concerned about.  It’s been 57 years since Soviet troops and most but not all of their Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia on August 21st 1968. The Warsaw Pact invasion crushed the political and economic reforms known as the Prague Spring, led by the country's then new First Secretary of the Communist party Alexander Dubcek.  

Leonid Brezhnev and other Soviet hard-liners in Moscow, probably correctly in the light of later events between 1989 and 1991, at least from their narrow perspective, saw the reform movement as a serious threat to the Soviet Union's hold on the Socialist satellite states, they decided to act. In the first hours on the 21st August 1968 Soviet planes began to land unexpectedly at Prague's Ruzyne airport, and shortly Soviet tanks would soon be trundling through Prague's narrow streets.  

Prague 1968

The Soviet-led invasion established the Brezhnev Doctorine, which allowed the U.S.S.R. to intervene in an country where a Communist government was perceived to be under threat. The Soviet backed occupation of Czechoslovakia lasted until the velvert revolution brought an end to the Communist dictatorship in November 1991 as the Cokd War ended. It was always contested - the reformist communists were finally defeated in the mid 1970's just as detent created the Helsinki accords which insoired Charter 77. Russia's attitude to the invasion still touches raw emotions, even in the Czech and Slovak republics. 

Tensions in the relationship between the Czechs and Slovaks (and other nationalities) had re-dated the establishment of the first republic in 1918. The perception (and reality, especially if you ask the Slovaks) was that Prague (and the Czechs) ran the republic touched a raw nerve in different parts of the republic. Ironically the Communist dictatorship which was resisted by dissidents, former reformist communists and ordinary citizens, kept the lid on internal tensions within Czechoslovakia between Czechs and Slovaks. 

The West's focus on Prague, the Czechs and the former Czech dissidents meant that tensions between Prague and Bratislava were mostly, but, not entirely missed. The welcome regular pronouncements about curbing the arms trade and arms exports did not go down well in Slovakia were a significant portion (but not all) of arms production was based. With the dictatorship gone, it took only a few years for the former state to split into the Czech and Slovak republics - both of whom became independent states on January 1st 1993, joining the the EU in May 2004 as they returned to Europe.

Now the Velvet revolutionaries are well into middle age, as are the rest of us who watched the fall of the wall and the communism in Eastern Europe. Now the visible symbols of communism are long gone, the unemployed and the homeless, invisible under communism are back as are the gleaming shopping centres and the well stocked supermarkets are part of normal life rather than the preserves of the communist elite. 

In Prague the Communism museum is increasingly difficult to find, and healthily irrelevant to younger Czechs. A generation or two of Czech and Slovak voters have grown up with democracy and no fear or a personal understanding of the fear of the secret police, the knock on the door in the night, or border guards and informers. They also don't have to worry about any consequences of expressing their opinions in work, education or at leisure and they have also have no limits on their no freedom of movement (beyond costs) within the EU - all of which has to be the ultimate positive. 

Remembrance is important, as is history, forgetting is very human and is part of life. Selectively forgetting the past and erasing our collective history is a more dubious practice ( especially in Hungary, Russia and the Peoples Republic of China, etc ) but also within these islands, especially when it comes to the perceptions of and the realities of Empire, etc. Creating a rose tinted view of the past, is neither history nor remembrance, its manufactured / peddled nostalgia - and that too is both dubious and dangerous. 

TIANANMEN SQUARE 32 YEARS ON

Police arrested an organiser of Hong Kong’s annual candlelight vigil remembering the deadly Tiananmen Square crackdown and warned people not to attend the banned event Friday as authorities mute China’s last pro-democracy voices. In recent years some tens of thousands of people have gathered in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park to honor the victims who died when China’s military put down student-led pro-democracy protests on June 4, 1989, killing thousands.

The PRC’s ruling Communist Party has never allowed any public events marking the military’s attack on protesters and citizens, and security was increased in the Beijing square Friday morning, with police checking pedestrians’ IDs and tour buses shuttling Chinese tourists as on any other day.

The PRC Authorities have actively prevented all discussion of the events on the Chinese mainland, where the few remaining activists and victims’ advocates are put under increased police monitoring and taken away on involuntary “vacations” around the anniversary. Responding to a question about the crackdown, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin on Thursday reiterated China’s stance that its response to the “political turmoil” of 1989 had been correct.

The PRC’s efforts to suppress public memory of the Tiananmen events have in recent years focused on Hong Kong, where the June 4 Museum was closed this week and police again Friday warned residents not to attend the vigil. A nighttime commemorative event in Victoria Park has been banned for a second year under coronavirus pandemic restrictions, although the city has had no local cases for over six weeks. 

This latest action comes amid sweeping moves to quell dissent in the city, including a new national security law, election changes and arrests of many activists who participated in pro-democracy protests that swept Hong Kong in 2019. Hong Kong police said Friday that they would be cordoning off parts of Victoria Park, including football fields and basketball pitches, to prevent any gatherings to commemorate the crackdown. 

Local media including the South China Morning Post newspaper reported this week that the police were planning to deploy about 7,000 officers on Friday to enforce the ban on unauthorised protests. Taking part in an illegal gathering has a maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment.

Chow Hang Tung, vice chair of the group, was arrested Friday morning, according to the alliance, which organised the vigil and ran the June 4 Museum dedicated to the memory of Tiananmen. After the ban was issued, Chow urged people to commemorate the event privately by lighting a candle wherever they are. Last year, thousands went to Victoria Park to light candles and sing songs. 

More than 20 activists including Chow were charged for their participation in an unauthorised assembly. Two other key members of the Hong Kong Alliance — Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho — are behind bars for taking part in unauthorised assemblies in 2019.

An appeal from Tiananmen Mothers, published on the Human Rights in China website, urged the party to release official records about the crackdown, provide compensation for those killed and injured, and hold those responsible to account. Tiananmen Mothers said 62 of its members have died since the group representing victims’ relatives was founded in the late 1990s. It said many young Chinese have “grown up in a false sense of prosperous jubilance and enforced glorification of the government (and) have no idea of or refuse to believe what happened on June 4, 1989, in the nation’s capital.”

The suppression of commemorations of the Tiananmen victims has been accompanied in recent years by harsh repression (if not genocide) against religious and ethnic minorities in Tibet, the northwestern region of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, along with the sharp curtailing of political rights in Hong Kong. Apologists  for the PRC abound, from the hard left activists, too  the hard right new liberal free marketeers - turning a blind eye to brutal repression (anywhere) is simply unacceptable in the twenty first century.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

Research has revealed that the global production of solar panels is using forced labour from China's Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province. Xinjiang produces about 45% of the world's supply of the key component, polysilicon, the research by the UK's Sheffield Hallam University says. The report produced by Sheffield Hallam University states that the material is obtained under a massive system of coercion, a claim denied by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) ruling authorities.

The report urges top panel makers to source the component elsewhere. Solar panels are in huge demand because of climate change. Polysilicon is extracted from mined quartz, and the research says the world's four biggest manufacturers use materials tainted by a massive system of coercion.

"The [Chinese] government claims that these programmes are in accordance with PRC [the People's Republic of China] law and that workers are engaged voluntarily, in a concerted government-supported effort to alleviate poverty," the report says. "However, significant evidence - largely drawn from government and corporate sources - reveals that labour transfers are deployed in the Uyghur Region within an environment of unprecedented coercion, undergirded by the constant threat of re-education and internment."

The PRC has placed millions of indigenous Uyghur and Kazakh citizens from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR or Uyghur Region) into what the government calls “surplus labour” and “labour transfer” programmes. An official PRC government report published in November 2020 documents the “placement” of 2.6 million minoritised citizens in jobs in farms and factories within the Uyghur Region and across the country through these state-sponsored “surplus labour” and “labour transfer” initiatives. 

The PRC claims that these programmes are in accordance with PRC law and that workers are engaged voluntarily, in a concerted government-supported effort to alleviate poverty. However, significant evidence – largely drawn from government and corporate sources – reveals that labour transfers are deployed in the Uyghur Region within an environment of unprecedented coercion, undergirded by the constant threat of re-education and internment. Many indigenous workers are unable to refuse or walk away from these jobs, and thus the programmes are tantamount to forcible transfer of populations and enslavement.

The PRC is facing mounting criticism from around the world over its treatment of the mostly Muslim Uyghur population in the north-western Xinjiang autonomous region. Human rights groups believe the PRC has detained more than a million Uyghurs over the past few years in what the state defines as "re-education camps". There is evidence of Uyghurs being used as forced labour and of women being forcibly sterilised.

We are living in a very connected world, in the 1930’s most people could state or at least claim that they did not know what went on in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, despite the courageous activities of journalists and political activists at the time to reveal the truth. In our 21st century connected world no one has the excuse of ignorance any more. The People’s Republic of China is a brutal, repressive, totalitarian dictatorship that represses all the peoples living within its borders - largely regardless of ethnicity.

The PRC has a long a dark record of brutality that goes back to the days of Mao, save for getting more technologically sophisticated, and delivering g prosperity at price to an expanding Middle Class, little appears to have changed. The Communist Party still controls the state, one of the last literal Empire’s and it thoroughly enjoys its privileges at the expense of the human rights people’s of China.

The PRC has a long well documented history of oppression - targeting minorities including the Tibetans, the Uygyr, and others. The PRC has also targeted ethnic Chinese citizens who resist oppression, seek freedom of thought, freedom of religion, or who have expressed concerns about environmental issues, land ownership and the cost of economic development that is being paid by the ordinary people.

The current UK Conservative Westminster PM, is keen, if not over-keen, perhaps with an eye to easing a post BREXIT trade deal with the USA, to send UK warships to confront the PRC in the South China Sea. This projection of UK military power east of Suez (the second time since 2003) may sit easily with the PM’s vision of ‘Global Britain’ but rather than sitting comfortably with military and strategic reality, it may owe more to the politics of fantasy island.

Not that Human rights violations and repression have ever stood in the way of economic or business dealings and commercial interests, previous Conservative and Labour PM’s have been much more accommodating to the financial and commercial (and political) interests and trading opportunities with the PRC and other repressive states in our recent past. George Osbourne, then Chancellor, desperately sought access to finance from China and encouraged the PRC’s involvement the in developing nuclear energy projects within the UK. 

What we had over the years of visionless New Labour, Conservative-Lib DeM and Conservative years is governments at Westminster, which remained hand in glove with despotic oil and gas-producing regimes in the Middle East ( aside from the vassal like relationship between the UK and Saudi Arabia ) who have had has little real interest in developing renewable energy to achieve energy independence or supporting democracy and social justice in the Middle East.

Teresa May’s weak wobbly and unstable Westminster government, along with its predecessor and successor worked actively to pull the rug out from under the renewables sector by cutting the feed in tariff something that cost highly skilled jobs here in Wales. As long as the UK state and the Westminster elite remains content to quietly look the other way when public attention is drawn to the PRC’s and Saudi Arabia’s gross human rights violations, then things are going to continue much as they have. 

WHEN DO YOU CHOOSE TO FORGET?

Friday 21st August 2020 was the 52nd  anniversary of the Soviet led invasion of Czechoslovakia, it’s an anniversary that these days increasingly passes largely unnoticed save perhaps by some people in Prague. Now that the Soviet Union is history, although Russia on the rise in the east, people have lots of other things to be concerned about.  It’s been 52 years since Soviet troops and most but not all of their Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia on August 21st 1968. 

The Warsaw Pact invasion crushed the political and economic reforms known as the Prague Spring, led by the country's then new First Secretary of the Communist party Alexander Dubcek.  Leonid Brezhnev and other Soviet hard-liners in Moscow, probably correctly in the light of later events between 1989 and 1991, at least from their narrow perspective, saw the reform movement as a serious threat to the Soviet Union's hold on the Socialist satellite states, they decided to act. In the first hours on the 21st August 1968 Soviet planes began to land unexpectedly at Prague's Ruzyne airport, and shortly Soviet tanks would soon be trundling through Prague's narrow streets.  

A Prague Street scene in August 1968

The Soviet-led invasion effectively established the Brezhnev Doctrine, which Moscow said allowed the U.S.S.R. to intervene in any country where a Communist government was under threat. The Soviet backed occupation of Czechoslovakia lasted until the velvet revolution brought an end to the Communist dictatorship in November 1991 as the Cold War ended. It was always contested - the reformist communists were finally defeated in the mid 1970's just as detente created the Helsinki accords which inspired Charter 77. Russia’s attitude to the invasion still touches raw emotions, evens in the Czech and Slovak republics. 

Tensions in the relationship between the Czechs and Slovaks (and other nationalities) had re-dated the establishment of the first republic in 1918. The perception (and reality, especially if you ask the Slovaks) that Prague (and the Czechs) ran the republic touched a raw nerve in different parts of the republic. Ironically the Communist dictatorship which was resisted by dissidents, former reformist communists and ordinary citizens, kept the lid on internal tensions within Czechoslovakia between Czechs and Slovaks. 

The West's focus on Prague, the Czechs and the former Czech dissidents meant that tensions between Prague and Bratislava were mostly, but, not entirely missed. The welcome regular pronouncements about curbing the arms trade and arms exports did not go down well in Slovakia were a significant portion (but not all) of arms production was based. With the dictatorship gone, it took only a few years for the former state to split into the Czech and Slovak republics - both of whom became independent states on January 1st 1993, joining the the EU in May 2004 as they returned to Europe.

Now the Velvet revolutionaries are well into middle age, as are the rest of us who watched the fall of the wall and the communism in Eastern Europe. Now the visible symbols of communism are long gone, the unemployed and the homeless, invisible under communism are back as are the gleaming shopping centres and the well stocked supermarkets are part of normal life rather than the preserves of the communist elite. 

In Prague the Communism museum is increasingly difficult to find, and perhaps healthily irrelevant to younger Czechs. More importantly perhaps a generation of Czech and Slovak voters have grown up with democracy and no fear or a personal understanding of the fear of the secret police, the knock on the door in the night, or border guards and informers. They also don't have to worry about any consequences of expressing their opinions in work, education or at leisure and they have also have no limits on their no freedom of movement (beyond costs) within the EU - all of which has to be the ultimate positive. 

Remembrance is important, as is history, forgetting is very human and is part of life. Selectively forgetting the past and erasing our collective history is a more dubious practice ( especially in Hungary, Russia and the Peoples Republic of China, etc ) but also within these islands, especially when it comes to the perceptions of and the realities of Empire, etc. Creating a rose tinted view of the past, is neither history nor remembrance, its manufactured / peddled nostalgia - and that too is both dubious and dangerous.